Google Play Store Starts Ranking Apps Based on Their Performance and Stability

The Google Play Store has always been criticized for not being as safe as Apple Store. Google has been striving hard to improve the user’s experience and has been rewarding users with promotions and store credit. The “Free App of the Week” section has been reintroduced. Google is also employing several methods by which they could promptly weed out the apps that don’t meet their standards and don’t maintain the quality of apps on the Play Store.

Starting now, Google has introduced a new ranking system that will rank the apps with the best quality on the top. If you end up searching for say a File Manager, Google will rank the applications from different publishers in accordance with the app quality and stability. User reviews might be a deciding factor, but they don’t qualify as a metric for the quality of the app.

“As part of our continued effort to deliver the best possible Google Play experience, we recently enhanced our search and discovery algorithms to reflect app quality. This results in higher quality apps being surfaced in the Play Store more than similar apps of lower quality (e.g., apps that exhibit more frequent crashes).”- Andrew Ahn, Product Manager of Google Play.

The ranking is also expected to ensure that the users download the app of the highest quality and this will also bring the uninstall rates down. Google Play Console will be used to identify the underlying performance issues. Thanks to the Pre-Launch reports on the Play Console publishers can fine tune their application even before its launch. The app performance improvements usually convert into better user ratings and also higher downloads.

At the recent Google Play App summit, the company showcased how they are fine tuning Google Play Console to help the app developers troubleshoot issues in a better way. Other interesting stats further depict how consumers in developing nation such as India are paying 3X as that of the U.S.